User Manual

Welcome to Zoop

Far from being Yet Another PHP Framework or Rails clone, Zoop has been in development since 2001 and in use for the last 6 years in a number of different production environments. While it predates the recent proliferation of PHP frameworks, it's based on solid MVC principles, including separation of display, logic, and data layers. It's designed to be efficient, modular, and extensible, striking a balance between lightweight and fully-featured.

What is a Framework?

The idea behind a framework is to offer a design you can use across multiple applications. All applications have a number of basic things in common. A framework is designed to provide a structure for those common elements (database interaction, presentation layer, application logic) so you spend less time writing up database interface code or presentation-layer interfaces and more time writing the application itself. The architecture represented by breaking an application up in this fashion is referred to as Model-View-Controller (MVC). Model refers to your data, View to your presentation layer, and Controller refers to the application or business logic.

-IBM

Zoop Features

  • A well-organized, fully-featured front controller.
  • A Smarty based view layer, enhanced with form generation and rich UI controls.
  • Several integrated data model access styles.
  • Automation of common mundane tasks.
  • Great native libraries and friendly integration with many third-party projects.